Contact & calendar management

Contact and calendar management is truly awesome as I wrote about previously. With the latest mango release Twitter and LinkedIn get brought into this unified system and messages that start with a text message can switch in and out of Facebook and Live Messenger as available.

What has this meant? Over the last year I’ve barely had to maintain contacts. Whenever I need to get hold of someone the information is there. If I want to see what they’re doing, it’s there. You can pin people to your start menu so having it automatically pick up a photo from a service is another bonus.

My Windows Phone is better for this than any other system I’ve used including my desktops.

Gorgeous user interface

The metro user interface is beautiful to use. It’s clear, fluid and fast and makes using the phone a breeze. You can see why Microsoft are adopting a similar user interface for their upcoming Xbox dashboard and seeing how far they can push the concept in Windows 8.

Such a bright fast user interface works best on the AMOLED displays such as that on the Focus – the LCD refresh rates on the HD7 for example seem to struggle with scrolling resulting in a shimmering on the screen.

Tasty Mango

Maps now includes both turn-by-turn directions (although you have to tap the screen after each one) and a useful Scout function that shows you nearby places to eat and visit.

Multitasking is a breeze, just double-tap the back button and visually pick the image showing the app you want to switch to. Not all apps support this yet but it’s getting better.

Voice has been underplayed – it’s like a mini Siri that can do a few things by voice activation such as calling people, finding places with Bing, opening applications and sending text messages. Just hold the Windows key to activate and speak :)

Power saver is a life-saver and something that Apple should be copying given recent iOS battery issues. It turns off wireless, email checking etc. either when you know battery is going or automatically when low and gets you through the tough spots.

Background music means not only can you play music in background with the built-in Zune stuff but even third party apps like Spotify can too! The controls and track names will appear on the lock screen and slide in anywhere you adjust the volume.

Hardware choice

Having a choice of hardware is great – you can pick the screen size (from 3.5″ to 4.7″), type, speed (1GHz to 1.5GHz) and specifications including slide-out keyboards, microSD expansion slots, a waterproof model and up to a 13.2 megapixel camera.

The negative side of having choice is that all the devices I’ve used have a combination of matt and shiny plastics none of which have the same quality feeling as the iPhone 4’s aluminum and glass. The LCD displays and the Super AMOLED with it’s PenTile display also don’t look as gorgeous as the iPhone retina display and has a sort of dithered effect with some solid colors when viewed closely.

The niggley bits

While most of the WP7 experience is great there are some rough edges that even Mango hasn’t yet sorted out.

Overly sensitive buttons

It’s actually great having a back button and prevents wasting screen on a back button like iOS does. The problem however is that both the back and search buttons are overly sensitive. It’s difficult to hold the phone in one hand and use it without your thumb hitting the pesky back button. It’s unfortunately something even the Xbox 360 slim picked up with the eject mechanism which is suitably annoying when putting away a controller.

Volume control

For some reason the phone has only one volume control that is shared by both applications and the ring-tone so if you’re the sort of person who like your phone low and your music loud you’re going to be constantly shifting back-and-forth and in my case that results in either embarrassing rings when it should be silent and silent rings when it should be working.

The volume control needs to be context sensitive. When in an app or the background music player is active adjust the audio volume otherwise adjust ringer volume.

Equalizer settings

There’s no sound equalizer settings so if you don’t like the sound coming from your speakers or headphones you’re stuck with it.

Build in a system-wide equalizer that at least affects the background music player.

[)amien

2 responses

Good review, I agree especially about the button sensitivities.

I have a HTC Trophy which comes with an equaliser app, this works quite well.

The only thing I dislike about the phone is that it defaults to sending stuff to MS in the background over the data connection; since I have a limited amount of data per month thanks to my provider, I’m not willing to have it turned on. My wife’s Radar had this issue too.

I know I’m a stuck record on this, but until they allow developers to use native code & shaders WP7 is, IMO, the new Blackberry – ie business and social only. I think I’d really like the WP7 UI, but I wouldn’t buy one because I know the OS doesn’t let developers do what they need to do to implement certain types of application.

I realise there are lots of developers who love .Net and have never used native code or shaders, but the 2 major incumbents make it fairly easy to port games & other performance / graphically demanding apps because they both support these things. On WP7 it’s a total rewrite, and even then you can’t get parity on either performance or feature set on WP7 – which given the far smaller user base is just not worth it for most developers. Anyone claiming XNA is just as good doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

Microsoft’s myopia on this is probably down to how popular .Net is in business development circles, but shutting off this option entirely just looks insane to anyone with even a modest a track record making games & graphical apps.

I guess for a large number of people, business functions and social are the main uses of a phone so this isn’t such an issue. But personally, if I’m going to spend money on the latest portable device, I’d rather buy one without a blind spot.